Jackson Pollock

Abstract Expressionist Painter

Male

BornJan 28, 1912

Paul Jackson Pollock, known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was well known for his uniquely defined style of drip painting. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and struggled with alcoholism for most of his life.… Read More

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'4, so this is your last chance to soak up the splatter and spill of the abstract expressionist movement before the paintings return to their rightful home in New York&#39;s Museum of Modern Art. The exhibit&#39;s got some big names: <mark>Jackson Pollock</mark>,'

Timeline

Learn about the memorable moments in the evolution of Jackson Pollock.

CHILDHOOD

1912Birth
Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, in 1912, the youngest of five sons.
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His parents, Stella May (née McClure) and LeRoy Pollock, were born and grew up in Tingley, Iowa and were educated at Tingley High School. Pollock's mother is interred at Tingley Cemetery, Ringgold County, Iowa. His father had been born with the surname McCoy, but took the surname of his adoptive parents, neighbors who adopted him after his own parents had died within a year of each other. Stella and LeRoy Pollock were Presbyterian; they were of Irish and Scots-Irish descent, respectively. LeRoy Pollock was a farmer and later a land surveyor for the government, moving for different jobs. Jackson grew up in Arizona and Chico, California. Read Less

TEENAGE

192816 Years Old
While living in Echo Park, California, he enrolled at Los Angeles' Manual Arts High School, from which he was expelled. He had already been expelled in 1928 from another high school.
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During his early life, Pollock explored Native American culture while on surveying trips with his father. Read Less

193018 Years Old
In 1930, following his older brother Charles Pollock, he moved to New York City, where they both studied under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League.
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Benton's rural American subject matter had little influence on Pollock's work, but his rhythmic use of paint and his fierce independence were more lasting. In the early 1930s, Pollock spent a summer touring the Western United States together with Glen Rounds, a fellow art student, and Benton, their teacher. Read Less

TWENTIES

From 1938 to 1942, during the Great Depression, Pollock worked for the WPA Federal Art Project.

Trying to deal with his established alcoholism, from 1938 through 1941 Pollock underwent Jungian psychotherapy with Dr. Joseph Henderson and later with Dr. Violet Staub de Laszlo in 1941–42.
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Henderson engaged him through his art, encouraging Pollock to make drawings. Jungian concepts and archetypes were expressed in his paintings. Recently, historians have hypothesized that Pollock might have had bipolar disorder. Read Less

THIRTIES

194331 Years Old
Pollock signed a gallery contract with Peggy Guggenheim in July 1943.
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He received the commission to create Mural (1943), which measures roughly 8 feet tall by 20 feet long, for the entry to her new townhouse. At the suggestion of her friend and advisor Marcel Duchamp, Pollock painted the work on canvas, rather than the wall, so that it would be portable. After seeing the big mural, the art critic Clement Greenberg wrote: "I took one look at it and I thought, 'Now that's great art,' and I knew Jackson was the greatest painter this country had produced." The catalog introducing his first exhibition described Pollock's talent as "volcanic. It has fire. It is unpredictable. It is undisciplined. It spills out of itself in a mineral prodigality, not yet crystallized." Read Less

Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 - August 11, 1956), known professionally as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was well known for his unique style of drip painting. <br /><br />During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety; he was a major artist of his generation. Regarded as reclusive, he had a volatile personality, and struggled with alcoholism for most of his life. Read Less

In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy.
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Pollock died at the age of 44 in an alcohol-related single-car accident when he was driving. Read Less

In October 1945, Pollock married the American painter Lee Krasner.
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In November, they moved out of the city to the Springs area of East Hampton on the south shore of Long Island. With the help of a down-payment loan from Peggy Guggenheim, they bought a wood-frame house and barn at 830 Springs Fireplace Road. Pollock converted the barn into a studio. In that space, he perfected his big "drip" technique of working with paint, with which he would become permanently identified.<br /><br /> Pollock was introduced to the use of liquid paint in 1936 at an experimental workshop in New York City by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. He later used paint pouring as one of several techniques on canvases of the early 1940s, such as Male and Female and Composition with Pouring I. After his move to Springs, he began painting with his canvases laid out on the studio floor, and he developed what was later called his "drip" technique. Read Less

He started using synthetic resin-based paints called alkyd enamels, which, at that time, was a novel medium. Pollock described this use of household paints, instead of artist’s paints, as "a natural growth out of a need". He used hardened brushes, sticks, and even basting syringes as paint applicators. Pollock's technique of pouring and dripping paint is thought to be one of the origins of the term action painting. With this technique, Pollock was able to achieve a more immediate means of creating art, the paint now literally flowing from his chosen tool onto the canvas. By defying the convention of painting on an upright surface, he added a new dimension by being able to view and apply paint to his canvases from all directions. <br /><br />A possible influence on Pollock was the work of the Ukrainian American artist Janet Sobel (1894–1968) (born Jennie Lechovsky). Peggy Guggenheim included Sobel's work in her The Art of This Century Gallery in 1945. Read Less

With Jackson Pollock, the critic Clement Greenberg saw Sobel's work there in 1946.
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In his essay "American-Type Painting," Greenberg noted those works were the first of all-over painting he had seen, and said, "Pollock admitted that these pictures had made an impression on him".<br /><br /> While painting this way, Pollock moved away from figurative representation, and challenged the Western tradition of using easel and brush. He used the force of his whole body to paint, which was expressed on the large canvases. Read Less

194735 Years Old
Pollock's most famous paintings were made during the "drip period" between 1947 and 1950.

194937 Years Old
He rocketed to fame following an August 8, 1949 four-page spread in Life magazine that asked, "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" At the peak of his fame, Pollock abruptly abandoned the drip style.

195139 Years Old
Pollock's work after 1951 was darker in color, including a collection painted in black on unprimed canvases.
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These paintings have been referred to as his 'Black pourings' and when he exhibited them at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York none of them sold. Parsons later sold one to a friend at half the price. The departure from his earlier style wasn't what his collectors wanted. Although these works show Pollock attempting to find a balance between abstraction and depictions of the figure.<br /><br /> He later returned to using color and continued with figurative elements. During this period, Pollock had moved to a more commercial gallery; the demand for his work from collectors was great. In response to this pressure, along with personal frustration, his alcoholism deepened.<br /><br /> Continuing to evade the viewer's search for figurative elements in his paintings, Pollock abandoned titles and started numbering his works. He said about this: " look passively and try to receive what the painting has to offer and not bring a subject matter or preconceived idea of what they are to be looking for." Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, said Pollock "used to give his pictures conventional titles... but now he simply numbers them. Numbers are neutral. They make people look at a picture for what it is—pure painting." Read Less

FORTIES

195543 Years Old
In 1955, Pollock painted Scent and Search, his last two paintings.

In 1956, Time magazine dubbed Pollock "Jack the Dripper", due to his painting style.
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Pollock observed American Indian sandpainting demonstrations in the 1940s. Referring to his style of painting on the floor, Pollock stated, “I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk round it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. This is akin to the methods of the Indian sand painters of the West.” Other influences on his drip technique include the Mexican muralists and Surrealist automatism. Pollock denied reliance on "the accident"; he usually had an idea of how he wanted a particular piece to appear. His technique combined the movement of his body, over which he had control, the viscous flow of paint, the force of gravity, and the absorption of paint into the canvas. It was a mixture of controllable and uncontrollable factors. Flinging, dripping, pouring, and spattering, he would move energetically around the canvas, almost as if in a dance, and would not stop until he saw what he wanted to see. As another important influence can be cited Wolfgang Paalen´s article on Totem Art of the indigenous people of British Columbia and his Fumage paintings which he had seen at Julien Levy´s exhibition of Paalen´s surrealist paintings in 1940. Pollock owned a signed and dedicated copy of the Amerindian Number of Paalen´s magazine (DYN 4-5, 1943), in which the revolutionary space concept in totemist art from the North-West-Coast is broadly discussed from an artist´s point of view. Read Less

He did not paint at all in 1956, but was making sculptures at Tony Smith’s home: constructions of wire, gauze, and plaster.
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Shaped by sand-casting, they have heavily textured surfaces similar to what Pollock often created in his paintings. Read Less

In December 1956, four months after his death, Pollock was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.
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A larger, more comprehensive exhibition of his work was held there in 1967. In 1998 and 1999, his work was honored with large-scale retrospective exhibitions at MoMA and at The Tate in London. Read Less

On August 11, 1956, at 10:15 pm, Pollock died in a single-car crash in his Oldsmobile convertible while driving under the influence of alcohol.
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One of the passengers, Edith Metzger, was also killed in the accident, which occurred less than a mile from Pollock's home. The other passenger, Ruth Kligman, an artist and Pollock's mistress, survived.<br /><br /> For the rest of her life, his widow Lee Krasner managed his estate and ensured that Pollock's reputation remained strong despite changing art world trends. The couple are buried in Green River Cemetery in Springs with a large boulder marking his grave and a smaller one marking hers.<br /><br /> The Pollock-Krasner House and Studio is owned and administered by the Stony Brook Foundation, a nonprofit affiliate of Stony Brook University. Regular tours of the house and studio occur from May through October. A separate organization, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, was established in 1985. The foundation functions as the official estate for both Pollock and his widow Lee Krasner, but also, under the terms of Krasner's will, serves "to assist individual working artists of merit with financial need". The U.S. copyright representative for the Pollock-Krasner Foundation is the Artists Rights Society. Read Less